Flame Tree Road (24 page)

Bertie gave up the theater and left for South Africa to work in a rubber plantation. Why, how or where, nobody knows or seems to care. How very typical of Bertie, don’t you think?

I now spend most of my time in London. I joined my friend Isadora to volunteer at the House of Mercy, a charitable institution patronized by our prime minister dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of fallen women. The choice of my cause makes Mummy cringe, but Daddy is supportive as always.

Estelle at least was putting her energy toward meaningful work, Biren thought, which was more that he could say for himself.

Sylhet

20th April 1894

I went to the temple hoping to see Charulata. The priest told me she died a year ago. At first people thought she was peacefully asleep under the banyan tree, and only when the monkeys started making a curious howling sound did they realize she was dead. “Lying there like a small brown leaf,” the priest said. Charulata was given a pauper’s funeral and nobody attended her cremation. Her bundle of books, feather brushes and packets of rice paste were burned along with her body. The ground under the banyan tree had to be purified with holy water.

I came away from the temple deeply saddened. What a waste of human life. Charulata was so pure, so timeless in her wisdom, like the old banyan tree. Surely she deserved to be remembered. I felt the urge to write about her. I sat and penned a three-part essay called “The Banyan Tree Widow.” I will send this onward to Samaresh for the
Bengal Star
.

Sylhet

21st April 1894

I have not heard from Samaresh ever since he wrote to say his uncle, the judge, had passed away. Samaresh’s cousins have taken over the family law firm and it seems he does not get along with them. This has dealt me a blow on the job front. I need a job. Any job. My choices are limited because doing any job is not an option in India. I wonder what people would say if they only knew of the different kinds of menial work I did back in England? Most of what I did would be classified low-caste work. I even dug graves for a while! In India that alone would put me in the class of the untouchables. I would be disowned.

I took a boat ride to the jute mill to meet Willis Duff but again I was in for a disappointment. He has gone to Scotland on furlough. I did not leave my name because I did not want to draw attention to myself as the son of Shamol Roy. The office staff thought I was a foreigner and treated me as such. On the boat ride back home I remembered Baba. How many times he must have taken the same journey. I felt saddened to think he had to sacrifice his own dreams just to put rice in our stomachs. He died so we could have the opportunity he never had, but now it feels like I am wasting precious time.

I have taken up meditation. The old
baul
sitting under the flame tree guided me in the practice. I found it very hard to concentrate at first but slowly the restlessness is coming under control.

The tea shop now has a new owner. Tilok, the old owner, perished in the cholera epidemic, as did most others in his village. I learned Tilok’s wife and one of the twin boys died, as well. Many of the fishermen of my childhood, including Chickpea and the ancient one they called Dadu, are all gone. Kanai became half-crazed with grief and wandered away in his boat, and has not been seen since. Most of the fishermen who gather at the tea shop now are unknown to me.

When the fishing boats come in I watch the fishermen unload their catch. Most days it is paltry pickings: bony fish, a crab or two. I find it hard to believe these same fishermen traverse the vast waterways leading out to the open sea but they have no yearning to venture beyond. They do not challenge their fate; there is no restlessness of spirit, no hunger of the soul. Is unquestioning acceptance the secret to contentment? I wonder.

CHAPTER

37

Sammy’s generosity knew no bounds, and invitations arrived back-to-back. Every second day the manservant would show up at Biren’s house with an invitation to lunch, tea or dinner—it hardly mattered which. Breakfast, thankfully, was exempt because Sammy was a notoriously late riser. After a slothful morning of drinking tea and mindless ambling around the anthill-ridden rose garden in his pajamas, Sammy indulged in a leisurely oil bath and head massage, by which time lunch was served. There was always some delicacy on the menu: sweet river prawns stewed in coconut milk, fish steamed with stone ground mustard or
elo-jhelo
, a sticky teatime snack made of twisted sugar dough. Sammy ordered Uma to pile up Biren’s plate and watched Biren eat while a manservant stood and fanned them with a palm frond.

Despite the smothering love, or perhaps because of it, Biren began to feel claustrophobic. To avoid Sammy’s endless invitations he started staying away from home, especially around mealtimes. He took long solitary walks by the river and sat on the bank and watched the brown mass of water push forward like a great, sluggish beast. The river never stood still. It was always going somewhere, carrying clumps of vegetation, floating driftwood and often curious objects all bumping and bobbing along. If he watched closely, he sometimes saw a muscular surge of water that hinted of a hidden force below. India was like the river, he thought. It looked as though things were not moving but an invisible current was directing the flow. Yet Biren felt as if he was trapped in an eddy, swirling in circles, cut off from the main stream.

Biren’s river walks took him farther and farther from home. One day he found himself in a village of potters. Here nobody knew who he was
and Biren gratefully accepted his anonymity. They called him the Belayti. Even though Biren dressed in Indian clothes, he still looked like a foreigner.

He watched, mesmerized, as the potters shaped mounds of river clay on hand-operated wheels into elegant vessels with scalloped rims. After being sun dried, the pots were loaded in a hay-covered pit and fired after a
puja
blessing ceremony conducted by the village priest. A single bad firing could ruin a whole week’s work after all. After being fired, the pots were hand burnished to rich terra-cotta gold. Twice a month they were packed in straw and loaded on a flatbed river barge that came laden with cargoes of pineapple and coconut from other villages, and shipped off to be sold in the markets of Dhaka.

Every member of the potter’s family had a specific role. Women and children gathered the clay from the riverbank in baskets and brought them to the village. The clay was dried, then pounded with sticks and sifted through a bamboo sieve into fine dust, which was then soaked in a clay pit. Younger able-bodied men used their muscle power to knead it to a soft doughlike consistency. Finally, the senior male potters operated the wheel and shaped the pots.

Biren was at the potter’s village watching Hori, a seventy-five-year-old potter, take a mound of clay and transform it into a large round-bottomed pitcher. Working with effortless grace, he squatted on the ground and spun the wheel. The walls of the clay first rose as a triangular form. It was then widened and finally rounded out into a perfect pitcher shape, using just the dexterity of his dampened fingertips.

“How long did it take you to learn how to do this?” asked Biren, fascinated.

“All my life,” said the old potter, “and all my father’s life and my forefathers’ before him. We come from generations of potters,
mia
. We are born into it. Everything I am today is because of the blessings of my ancestors. They guide the turning of the wheel. My fingers are their fingers. I learned how to throw a pot by first learning about the nature of the clay. Clay is very temperamental. It has a mind of its own. To shape it into something useful you have to know how it will behave under the pressure of your fingers. Every child in the village learns about the nature of clay from the day he is born.”

Biren pondered what he said. This was what caste was all about. The collective skills of a community passed down from generation to generation, not easily picked up by an individual. Many of the pottery techniques were closely guarded community secrets.

“Didn’t you ever want to do anything different?” Biren asked. “Like being a carpenter or a blacksmith?”

The old potter stopped his wheel, looked at Biren and laughed.

“What kind of question is that,
mia
?” he said. “Does a woodpecker ever want to be a kingfisher? Of course not! They are a different caste. We are born with different skills. Even if I worked very hard and learned the skills of a carpenter, could I ever be one? You are talking as if a man can be whatever he chooses. It is not so simple,
mia
, not so simple.”

“Why not?” asked Biren, puzzled. “If you have the talent and skills to be a carpenter, you can change your profession. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Just listen to yourself talk! It is not skills that make a profession,
mia
, it is community. Would I ever be accepted into the carpenters’ community? Do I know their customs? What would happen to my family? Where would we live? We would belong nowhere. We would become people without roots, like the water gypsies and the
bauls
, wandering from place to place.”

“What is wrong with that?” muttered Biren, almost to himself.

“Be careful,
mia
. This is dangerous thinking. Without the blessings of your ancestors and the roots of your community, a man can lose himself.”

“Or he can break free and find himself,” Biren argued.

The old potter just smiled, shook his head and started turning his wheel again to shape his pot.

Strange
, Biren thought.
You can take a lump of clay and mold it into anything you want, but why is it not possible to remold a human?
It would be interesting to see how far he could reshape his own destiny. He had been given every opportunity; now it was up to him.

* * *

Biren heard a shout and looked up to see a small boy in ragged shorts with clay-caked hands come running down the crooked path from the river.

The boy huffed up to them. He pointed at Biren. “The fisherman told me to find this
belaytidada
and bring him to the river. They are waiting for him.”

“Who is waiting?” asked Biren.

“The real
belaytis
. The pink ones. They want to talk to you,” said the boy.

“Pink
belaytis
. What do they want?” said Biren, puzzled. Englishmen normally did not come to a potters’ village.

The boy just pulled Biren’s shirtsleeve. “Come, come,” he said. “The
belaytis
are in trouble. They sent me to get you because nobody can understand what they are saying.”

On the way to the river, Biren gathered from the small boy that a steamer had broken down at the ghat and on board were two
belaytis
. The
belaytis
had rattled off in “eenglees” to the fishermen and nobody could understand a word. The steamer crew meanwhile had gone off toward the jute mill to get help.

Biren arrived at the ghat to find the steamer docked and two Englishmen in the tea shop. The older of the two, a disgruntled gentleman dressed in khakis and a
sola
topee, sat by himself on the battered old bench outside smoking a pipe. He glanced impatiently at his pocket watch and had about him the bristling stiffness of an army man. The other fellow was inside the shop smoking a bidi, communicating with wide animated gestures with the fishermen, who were trying not to laugh.

Seeing Biren, the fishermen all started talking at once and pointing at the two men.

“Is there some way I can help you gentlemen?” Biren asked.

The two Englishmen looked startled to hear him speak the Queen’s English. Coming from a man dressed like a local in a blue-and-white-checkered
lungi
and cotton shirt, it did sound rather odd.

“My good fellow,” said the older gentleman, getting to his feet. He spoke in a clipped manner. “Our steamer has broken down in this godforsaken village, as you can see. We are trying to get to Silchar. I am Reginald Thompson, district commissioner, and this here—” he pointed his pipe at the other gentleman “—is Griffiths, my assistant.”

“How do you do,” Biren said, shaking hands.

“You don’t look like a potter, old chap,” said Griffiths, looking at him curiously. “What are you doing here? You speak bloody good English, I daresay.”

Biren told them briefly about his education in England. It seemed Griffiths had studied at Oxford and the two of them were just getting into a conversation when Reginald Thompson cut them short.

“Excuse me, dear fellows, this is no time for chitchat. We have a crisis on our hands,” he said brusquely. He turned to Biren. “The steamer fellows say they have to send for an engine part. This is not a simple repair. It may take another day, maybe two. They have gone to the jute mill to see if they can send word to Dhaka. Now, it is absolutely crucial I get back to Silchar tonight, no matter how late. I have an important matter to attend to in the morning. We wanted to ask the fishermen if they could take us by boat to Silchar. I understand it is three hours from here by these small boats.”